Phing development update

A few years ago I pledged to publish regular updates on Phing’s development. I’m a little ashamed that I haven’t done that for nearly three years. Needless to say, a lot has happened, so it’s about time to post an update!

Recent releases

The latest version, 2.14.0, was released in March. Ever since the move of the code to GitHub, a steady flow of pull requests and contributions has resulted in a lot of new functionality, improved documentation and numerous squashed bugs.

Here’s a selection of interesting features that have recently been added:

Support for PHP 7 & HHVM.

A flurry of new tasks: stopwatch, switch, throw, retry and many more.

Better support for composer and numerous dependencies (such as PHPUnit).

Additional selectors and conditions.

Remember the old HTML user guide? That has been replaced by (significantly improved!) Docbook5 documentation.

Additional tests & test coverage.

Of course there’s much more and all the details can be found in the changelog.

Coming up

The next minor version, 2.15.0, should be released in a few weeks, the tickets assigned to that version can be found here.

Beyond Phing itself, there are a few planned changes to the website and the build process:

Migrating the ticket tracker (Trac) to GitHub issues.

Shipping a “full” .phar file with each release (containing recent versions of the most popular dependencies).

Phing 3.0

A serious refactor of Phing has been on my own wishlist for quite some time. Some work towards that goal has been committed to the 3.0 branch and I try to keep this branch more or less synchronized with master (albeit with some delay). The branch is entirely functional and requires PHP 5.6+ or above.

Some of the work that’s still in progress or on the roadmap: integrating SPL, changing the way booleans are handled, a proper task autoloader, cleaning up the code, improving the test harness, etc. If you have suggestions, then please let me know! Time available to spend on a pull request is even better 🙂

Michiel Rook

Michiel Rook is an experienced consultant, developer, trainer & speaker from the Netherlands. He loves helping teams and companies to develop better software and improve the delivery process. When he’s not thinking about continuous deployment, devops or event sourcing he enjoys music, cars, sports and movies.